Cloud Proof of Concept Project

Posted November 11, 2012 02:16 PM
by Peter Kunszt

SyBIT is engaged in a proof-of-concept project in academic cloud computing together with the ETH, UZH and SWITCH. We provide several of the use cases to the project. The motivation behind it has to do with the sustainability effort of SyBIT – all the services and tools that we provide for SystemsX.ch could be stored in an academic cloud for further use beyond SystemsX in the future. And also in the coming years we would greatly profit of an academic cloud infrastructure for servers and collaboration tools for our projects.

The project is called Academic Cloud Computing and Provisioning and is funded by a SWITCH-AAA grant. There are three testbeds that are set up as part of the project: A commercial ‘private cloud appliance’ from HP called ‘HP CloudSystem Matrix’ – this system is already operational at the ETH; a self-built private cloud also at the ETH and a self-built private cloud at the UZH. In addition, also SWITCH is building their own cloud testbed. All of these are built such that we can run complementary experiments on them both for the infrastructure and application components.

The choice between the many Cloud Stacks is not easy, but after a long and detailed evaluation it was decided to go with OpenStack for all testbeds. We have also hooked up with the Zurich University of Applied Sciences’ Cloud team at ICCLab.